Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns

So don't get me wrong, if you are here because of nostalgia, you are probably in the right place. I got into the game for the same reasons and it's good for me. However I can't recommend the game with clear conscience to anyone else.  The Good: 1. New kingdom mode can be fun, although it's heavily biased 2. The new classic mode is exactly what the game promised 3. The retro mode is exactly what you expect. The Bad: 1. Click logic and mechanics. You want to hit with a catapult you put a measuring point on it and move a notch up or down, don't be surprised if you miss anyway. The only way to win is to learn the castles in each territory by heart - vs catapult arm position. 2. You have an army that is 3 times the size of your opponent, you will win with 50% losses. Your opponent has an army that is 3 times the size of yours, they will crush you with 25% losses or worse.  3. You are exactly correct in the saddle, the lance is going exactly where it should, too bad you lose.  The Ugly: New game mode with dice seems nice especially the roguelike elements unfortunately it is there to fully trick you. 1. You want to save a maiden event badly... you clicked on 4 when your opponent had 4 on his dice, you still will lose -> even though you did a right action at the right time (but game didn't register it as such) 2. You desperately need a better deck and money, too bad, we added quick timed event that you need to complete in 7 turns otherwise restart the game (to be fair, it's doable but you will get a lot of frustration with this design) 3. You completed everything... played retro, classic, won in kingdom, all that is left is achievement grind on a game with pretty poor design and code full of bugs.  Verdict is: If you liked the original you know what you are up against.  If you are a new player and want to deal with the frustration of failing without any explanation on what went wrong -> this is definitely for you. If you are a new player and don't want to deal with frustration, avoid. If you melt on a single failure, definitely avoid it.

Oof... where to begin? The graphics really are well done. Also good job on the music, guys. But now for details: At the beginning of the game, I lost nearly every attempt to conquer an oppenent's territory. Then, somewhere around midgame, all the opponents stopped conquering, just built towers on their land and waited to be attacked. I guess they didn´t have time for conquering anymore because they all had a serious crush on this Rosalind chick, whom I had to rescue about 15 times in a single game. She must be one hell of a bride. Meanwhile I only got Katharine whom apparently no other guy wanted. Combat: There are 4 different battle strategies for fighting but absolutely no explanation of what any of them actually does. I had a fight with 300 vs 100 soldiers and every tick both sides lost 2 soldiers. Same in a fight with 100 vs 80 soldiers. Every tick, 2 soldiers on each side died. I think the real competition was the waiting time until one side finally reached zero, because alt-tabbing out of the game to read some stuff pause the battle. Jousting: What a mess... A round lasts about 3 seconds and that's it. You should aim your lance at the opponent's shield, but the round is over just about the time you realize where the shield is. You don't get any feedback on what went right or wrong. Just a popup saying you won or lost the round and that's it. This is okay for a 40 years old game, but not for a 2026 remake. Catapult Siege: You need to count the clicking sounds while winding up the catapult to measure the trajectory. Stupid thing when wifey's yelling at the kids in the background while you need to focus on those nasty clicks to tear down that damn wall. You get 3 different projectiles with different weights to choose from and have 6 shots in this minigame. The goal is to bring down the wall, fire burning and poisonous projectiles into the castle to lower the defending troops. Could be fun, if it weren't the same scene with the same goals and the same amount of shots every time. Swordfighting: In my opinion the best minigame, but still gets tedious after the second time. There is no option to disable the atrocious screen shaking. Even the maid starts laughing at you when the victory message pops up after you've rescued her for the fifteenth time on the same scene with the same enemies and the same weapons. I refunded this one, because it's just not ready yet. Devs, the minigames need much more love and less triggering. Oh and tell those other lords to do their job instead of crush-kidnapping. I want to play Defender of the Crown and not a bride-extraction-simulator.

Posting review just to vent on raid/rescue swordsmanship mini-game in Kingdom mode. Who though that in nostalgia strategy game, played by older players, they need to add mini-game which requires extreme reflexes with single frame accuracy. Lost several hours just trying to win maid rescue and haven't succeeded even once. Writing this review, while being extremely frustrated. For other readers, this is specific to Kingdom roguelike mode, not Retro and Classic modes, which play like old game. Those are fine.

More retro games need this treatment! Not only do you get the original version, there is a remastered mode with updated graphics and controls and a roguelike version. It is a great way to bring a classic to a new generation and it gives it a lot of replayability. The game even has controller support in the updated version. The roguelike game is a full added mode too with deck building and different difficulties. My only negative is the gameplay is thin for strategy fans but hte original was released in 1986 so keep that in mind. Here is a playthrough of classic mode, which is the original mode remastered for modern day: https://youtu.be/nMR8fkD1nrU

I waited a month to be kinda disappointed. The NES version is still a better game experience. How many tournaments need to be called as well, can we not have the maidens getting kidnapped every 2 min Seriously I rescued a maiden, very next round kidnapped, I just ignore her now and yet shes not gone. and gets kipnapped every 3-5 turns. Jousting is just straight up awful Coulda been so much better

[H1] The Legend Returns from the dead...and it's a little stiff and stinky [/H1] I love Defender of the Crown. I remember staring at it, jaw agape as a young child, unable to comprehend the graphics I was witnessing. It was a technological step above everything else at the time, and it introduced a 7 year old me into the world of Strategy. I've ended up picking up pretty much every version of the game ever since - the early and ambitious (but flawed) NES console version, the C64 port with added crossbow and mace battle minigames, the unreleased ZX Spectrum port, and of course, the sequel on Amiga CD32, and the remasters that followed on various platforms in the early 2000's, including the reimagined game based entirely on Robin Hood's perspective that released on Xbox and PS2. Out of all of the versions of Defender of the Crown I've played, "Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns" is one of the weakest. While some of the visuals look quite nice in this reboot, the gameplay itself is a mere shadow of it's former self. [h3] "Retro" Mode [/h3] In the Retro mode, you aren't getting a 1-to-1 replica of the original game. It feels very different, like someone just copied the assets from the original game and slapped them into a flash game. In the action segments, everything feels very floaty and off. Boulders don't fly from catapults right, sword fighting just feels like you're sliding across the floor when you move. [h3] "Classic" Mode [/h3] The modern version of the game looks nice but has it's own issues. Jousting looks REALLY pretty but unfortunately shaves off too much of the presentation to encapsulate the majesty of the original's jousting mode. You get no build-up, no sense of spectacle. You don't watch the horses get into position, you don't build speed up any more, you just ride, strike and then move on. The raids have an awful feel to them - an attempt was made to expand the battles with a parry system, but most of the time it doesn't work. Enemies just stand in a blocking stance, allowing you to stab 'em to death with no resistance. The sprite work has a lovely HD-2D style to them, but the backgrounds suffer with horrendous compression artefacts on the art in the dark spaces of the castle walls. The strategy mechanics in the map overworld haven't evolved at all since 1986. Winning the game is still as simple as rushing the enemy castles as quickly as possible in order to win. No new modes, mini game sections or anything else have been added outside of the new balance mechanic in jousting. Even scenes featured in the C64 and NES games, and bonus modes in DOTC Heroes Live Forever haven't been revisited here. Graphics might've been updated and locations may have changed, but nothing's really been improved over what's come before in any meaningful way outside of presentation. [h3] "Kingdom" Mode [/h3] Now this is something truly fresh and interesting. A Rogue-like, deck-building take on the game, "Kingdom" mode completely changes the way the game is played and is something genuinely worth exploring. It's obvious that this mode is where the majority of the game's development was focused on, but the enemy AI can still be easily exploited - there are obvious strategies which are almost unbeatable, and once you discover them, it breaks the enemy's strategy. While I had fun running through this mode with this mode and discovering what it had to offer, it doesn't justify the price of entry. [h3] Final Thoughts [/h3] All in all, "Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns" is yet another disappointing reboot that flounders in the face of the original. Underneath it all, there is a fun game trying to break free, but, unless you're particularly interested in checking out Kingdoms Mode, you're better off just emulating one of the original home computer versions of the game - It's a better overall experience. Unless you're playing on a Steam Deck, go play the DOS version for free on the Internet Archive instead. [h1]5 out of 10[/h1]

I usually don't like to leave negative reviews, but this remake is hard to defend. For a remake of a 40-year-old classic, it gets the basics wrong. Combat has terrible response times and poor visibility — you can't really see what's happening or make tactical decisions, which the original handled better. The controls feel unresponsive and there's no option for classic PC controls. Jousting was always the weakest part of Defender of the Crown, but this remake makes it worse. Attacks feel like they last three seconds and there are no tutorials for jousting or swordfighting. It's also buggy. During swordfights my character constantly drifted backwards unless I held D. That's an obvious bug for a one-dimensional mechanic. After all this time in development, it's disappointing. Just play the original in DOSBox

Since I played the Amiga version in the 90s (the graphics was from another planet back then), I was curious as to how this remaster can polish up the game. My experience was disappointment, however - the classic mode is just a new graphics for the antiquated paper-thin strategy game. The jousting is still a mess - there is no feedback on what's going on, and you will lose without knowing why. The swordplay is somewhat better (you can parry and use strong attacks), but it's not mechanically well designed and degrades into button mashing). The battles are on auto-pilot with a few choices that are never explained in depth. There is an encyclopedia, but it does a very poor job in explaining the actual game mechanics. I managed to finish the game in just 40 minutes without the opponents posing any challenge whatsoever. The retro mode is exactly what you remember from the 90s. The Classic mode is Retro plus modernized graphics, which is quite nice, I admit, even the interface is much more functional, but the AI is the same old stupid AI, and there is no actual strategy - after you knock down the enemy home castle, you get all his territories, which quickly steamroll into a win. The Kingdoms mode is a dice and card game I did not find interesting at all. I decided to refund the game because after flipping through all its few pages, I don't see anything compelling to return to.

I really want to like this game. It looks like the exact kind of thing I would play, it has medieval knights, jousting, diplomacy, strategy, and everything else. I just don't understand it. It feels like it's nowhere near finished and is actually just scripted with zero skill or outcome determining the results. After I found out how to split up my units, I just sat around taking all the most valuable territories and then spammed units to make my army massive. The siege mechanic is totally unfinished, you have to randomly guess where to fire the catapults and it seems very inaccurate. But then again, you can also just storm the castle and don't need to waste your time throwing rocks at it? Someone in the country, I don't know who, will keep on doing jousting tournaments that are just basically impossible to understand and cannot be completed. The controls are severely lacking, and don't even seem to make sense. When I attacked with my swordsmanship on foot, it didn't really make any sense as to how to do things. Blocking was for lack of a better word, hit and miss. Sometimes you can block, sometimes you can't. Then randomly you lose control and just stand there, I assume I got stunned, but don't know how? Is it 3 blocks? 2 blocks? Why doesn't the enemy get stunned from 2 blocks? It doesn't make sense. Also, everyone keeps kidnapping women? What am I meant to do, it does nothing? After I rescued someone, she joined me, but then she got kidnapped and I just ignored it, then she was still there and nothing changed. So I just kept ignoring her being kidnapped and it seemed like the game was fine with that. Finally, when I decided to take on the odds and fight a big battle, none of the tactics did anything noticeable apart from moving arrows on the screen. No men died at a faster or slower rate, and a lot of the tactics don't even make sense. This game is a mess, it's nowhere near ready, and just feels like it's on rails and has very little playstyle that you can master. I believe it's supposed to be a reimagining of an old game that I didn't play, which is fine, but as a game that works/functions, it just doesn't really. I'm very disappointed.